“Zoom fatigue” refers to a mental overload that reduces productivity. Senior managers believe there is AI in the investment of meetings.
The Stanford Virtual Human Interaction AI Lab studied the psychological effects of protracted video conferencing and online meetings in early 2021. Sixty-five percent of 182 senior managers polled at UNC-Chapel Hill said meetings delayed them from finishing their job, while seventy-one percent said most meetings were inefficient and unproductive. Some tech companies now say all our time has been sucked up into the cloud.
With the rise of technology-dependent remote employees, new solutions emerge to make in-person and virtual meetings more effective. More timely meetings are what we’re after — and AI is out to make that possible.
Inventive Idea — The Meeting Room
Managers hold meetings to share information. Whether in person or on tape, much of what is said in a meeting can be lost, and most people report that they only catch a percentage of the information in their meetings. Most employees say that data is lost or forgotten from meetings.
As a result, Artificial intelligence (AI) systems can categorize and prioritize information as the human brain does. For example, meeting data can be evaluated similarly, highlighting key points and ignoring minor ones.
Former UMT Consulting Group (now EY) CEO Gil Makleff and Visual Trading Systems CTO Artem Koren are two industry leaders working on this topic with Sembly. “We founded Sembly to exploit meeting information to assist organizations in avoiding costly failures while giving opportunistic insights that were not feasible before advanced natural language understanding, and our AI-powered enterprise technologies, capture these.”
Their strategy is to improve employee satisfaction: In an increasingly distant working environment, AI technology is critical for enhancing cross-team information flow and driving better results.
Enhancing Employee Experience
It’s well known that organizations have adapted to remote or hybrid work settings in the last year. As a result, even the most technologically advanced companies have had to adopt new communication strategies. As a result, leaders must prioritize keeping employees interested and productive during these enormous transitions in work patterns.
Online meeting technology has evolved from a physical distance-bridging aid to a knowledge and productivity tool. Insurer Brandon Beal and wildlife photographer Greg Piper use AI-enabled meeting technology. For example, Piper and Beal employ AI to streamline daily interactions with vendors and colleagues.
Makleff and Koren collaborated to develop proprietary algorithms that transcribe and evaluate operational sessions. For example, Sembly, a SaaS platform, uses AI to extract critical moments from meetings, allowing attendees to get more out of them.
Platforms like Sembly can employ natural language understanding to capture and summarize meeting content. As a result, such “Glance” technology from Sembly AI delivers a meeting summary, helping attendees focus on the most critical points while eliminating irrelevant information.
Making a Paradigm Shift With Meeting Tech
As long as meetings exist, there will be someone taking minutes. Voice AI and transcription technology have revolutionized the way professionals utilize their information. Transcribing a conversion takes three steps:
- Recognizing the speaker’s voice
- Collecting the audio
- Converting it to digital
Speech engines are no longer a one-size-fits-all solution. For example, to manage even the briefest meeting, technologies used to distinguish speakers have required considerable improvement. Also, the sessions themselves have altered tremendously.
It provides a searchable, shareable digital document of a meeting that is kept in a Meeting Cloud and can be accessed at any time for sync and follow-up while preserving strong access controls. As a result, the direct impact of deploying AI solutions can save time and effort. For example, companies like Family First Life, ReinventU, and Good Ranchers all took part in a study that showed AI solutions enhanced virtual meeting efficiency by 25%.
This direction for meetings shows a significant paradigm change moving businesses from binary meetings to continuous information flow. In addition, the post-meeting discourse will enable non-participants to access meeting content and join in the conversation.
An Attendance Paradox: Produce More?
AI improves meeting efficiency by taking notes, organizing notes, decreasing follow-up activities, and shortening meetings. In addition, it extends business teams, taking over mundane duties and executing them effortlessly and elegantly.
The Great Resignation shows how important it is for employers to engage employees. Time-consuming meetings are not conducive to employee satisfaction or productivity. In addition, engagement is challenging in a virtual or mixed setting.
For example, employers can utilize modern technologies to track sentiment and involvement in a single meeting or overtime to overcome some of these issues. Data sets give leaders a pulse on how well meeting notes are being received and retained, organizational trends, and collaboration.
Conclusion
AI encourages collaborative intelligence, enhancing insight and supporting corporate leaders in making more intelligent decisions. For example, humans and AI work together to attain optimal results.
It all depends on you. You can’t create time. But you can control it. So take time to make time with AI implementation.
Image Credit: Tara Winstead; Pexels; Thank you!
Hunter Meine
Hunter Meine is a BYU-Idaho graduate, husband, father, and writer. When he's not writing, he's playing sports or enjoying the outdoors with his wife and daughter.